Erin E. Edgington
Edmond de Goncourt’s La maison d’un artiste (1881) is a difficult work to classify within the large body of Goncourt non-fiction, primarily because it seems to sit astride generic boundaries, incorporating elements of some of the brothers’ better-known projects, notably art historical works like L’ art du XVIIIe siècle and their voluminous journals.1 It is a catalogue, characterized by long lists of objects and possessions, but it is nonetheless styl-ized, not only because long narrative passages recounting key episodes related to the collections under discussion accompany the lists, but also because the lists themselves only rarely read as such. What the reader finds in the pages of its two volumes is not only documentary text, but also paragraphs of prose that serve as a record while maintaining a readability that is lacking in most other contemporary catalogues, including those prepared to accompany the eventual sales of the Goncourt collections.
1 On the relationship between the literature and the collecting practices of the Goncourt brothers, see Dominique Pety, Les Goncourt et la collection:
De l’objet d’art à l’art d’écrire (Geneva: Droz, 2003).
At its most superficial level, the text is defined by multiple boundaries. Indeed, the work’s several chapters represent not only textual divisions, but physical divisions as well, since they divide the home in the same way that its walls do, so that the text becomes a kind of hyper-detailed schematic. That the chap-ter divisions function as delimichap-ters of physical as well as textual space is likewise made apparent by the fact that the two volumes that make up the work progress logically through the space as if the reader were actually touring the home, with volume one beginning in the vestibule and volume two taking the reader through the home’s private spaces, concluding in the garden.
The very purpose of this text, it would seem, is to grant a larger audience access to the home, allowing them to cross its thresh-old and disappear into a fabricated environment as far removed as possible from the banality and the unpleasantness of typical, everyday life.
Speaking purely in terms of its basic organization into chap-ters, the text is both taxonomical and hierarchical; while cer-tain spaces, notably the salons and the library (which doubles as a workspace), are described in lengthy chapters, and others, like the vestibule, receive shorter descriptions, every space is addressed in order. If on the surface the text seems to follow a very straightforward order, though, upon closer inspection its internal boundaries reveal themselves to be as permeable as the spaces it facsimiles, and equally as subject to disruption. This is true on several levels: first, some of the Goncourt collections are large enough to require space in more than one room and, therefore, in more than one chapter; this is the case, for instance, of the collection of French works on paper, which occupies both salons and the stairwell. Second, episodes related to collections displayed in one space sometimes take place in another part of the house, subtly challenging the authority of the chapter head-ings; one such episode, to which I will return in what follows, is a key narrative passage that functions as a perfect microcosm of this already claustrophobic work. Third, multiple collections sometimes intermingle within individual spaces, as in the din-ing room where an heirloom servdin-ing-board is foiled by an
im-ported folding screen decorated with a floral motif. This kind of juxtaposition is a key feature of this and other Goncourt works, and one that Pamela Warner has explored in more detail; signif-icantly, she notes that Edmond’s practice of pairing French and Far Eastern objects is linked with his overall tendency to “[see]
Japanese art through eyes deeply familiar with eighteenth-cen-tury France,” a tendency that “caused [him] to find connections in surprising places.”2 According to noted collector Samuel Bing, writing in the introduction to the catalogue for the sale of the Goncourt collections in 1897, “the honor of having affirmed the solidarity of all the arts, and the fact that they ought to be grouped, not according to their local origins, but rather accord-ing to the affinities between them, belongs to the Goncourts.”3 The Literary within the Documentary
Given the grand scale and exceptional quality of the brothers’
collections, and the work’s title, where the term artiste clearly references their écriture artiste while simultaneously emphasiz-ing its links with the plastic arts tradition precisely via its eras-ure of the term écriteras-ure, it is not particularly difficult to think of the home as a museum space. Indeed, Edmond himself makes the comparison fairly explicit with his continual insistence upon the quality of his objects and upon his own skill in arranging them. We might just as easily imagine the artist’s home as a gal-lery of his work, or else as a work in its own right. Juliet Simpson has called attention to the way in which the title designates La maison d’un artiste “as a work of singular artistry” as well as not-ing “a grownot-ing interest in the art-work potential of the domestic
2 Pamela Warner, “Compare and Contrast: Rhetorical Strategies in Edmond de Goncourt’s Japonisme,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 8, no. 1 (2009): n.p.
3 “c’est l’honneur des Goncourt d’avoir affirmé que tous les arts sont solid-aires, qu’il faut les grouper, non suivant des origines locales, mais selon des parentés de sentiment” (Samuel Bing, “Les arts de l’Extrême-Orient dans les collections des Goncourt,” in Collection des Goncourt: Arts de l’Extrême-Orient [Paris: Motteroz, 1897], iii).
home.”4 Considering the space from this perspective suggests a fourth boundary that is disrupted by the work, namely, that between institutionalized display spaces and private domestic space.
All of these disruptions owe in some sense to the work’s iden-tity as a catalogue, that is to say, as a realistic representation of the home’s contents. If we take the text at face value, we might say that artistic intentionality is lacking in it, since a catalogue may be categorized as a purely documentary text. Immediately, though, we are confronted again with the title and its incontro-vertible designation of its author’s profession. To begin to ap-preciate the work as something more than a detailed, prosaic exegesis of fin-de-siècle aesthetics, then, it becomes necessary to consider the breakdown of boundaries not only within the home’s rooms and within the text’s chapters, but also between genres. La maison d’un artiste is a hybrid: like most of the many hundreds of catalogues published in the second half of the nineteenth century to accompany high-profile art auctions, it is comprehensive, offering all the detail another enthusiast could desire; unlike these texts, it includes narrative passages.
These passages and the anecdotes they recount are easily jus-tified from a literary perspective. As would such passages in an extended work of fiction, they punctuate the text, adding vari-ety and interest beyond that provided by the objects themselves.
This uneven weighting of description and action in La maison d’un artiste is complementary to the novelistic aesthetic that developed over the course of the nineteenth century in which descriptions of objects balance narrative. Edmond’s stories, like the collections that run the gamut from centuries-old Chinese and Japanese porcelain to custom-bound editions of contempo-rary literature, vary widely and include tales reproduced from books in the library, as well as intimate stories about the life he shared with his brother (for whom Malin Zimm has called the work “a kind of epitaph”) and his own solitary life following
4 Juliet Simpson, “Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors — Towards the Symbolist Maison d’art,” Romance Studies 29, no. 1 (2011): 2.
Jules’s death. Importantly, they are equally characterized by an instability between past and present, and memory and reality.5
Indeed, although its narrative is sparser, La maison d’un ar-tiste is easily grouped with paradigmatic novels of collecting.
The collection of works on paper, which includes works by Old Masters like Fragonard and Boucher, recalls the art collection in Balzac’s Le cousin Pons, for example, and the links between Edmond’s catalogue and Huysmans’s À rebours are undeniable.6 The misfit collection amassed by Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, too, is worth mentioning, since La maison d’un artiste is essen-tially a record of the same kind of project, but undertaken by two discerning collectors rather than two clueless, bourgeois retirees. This darkly funny novel has more to do with Edmond’s catalogue than might at first be evident, for if we can agree that Edmond and Jules had a good eye for works of art and other objects that would appreciate in value, we cannot say that they benefitted from extraordinary means in the purchasing of their collections. However, the key aspect of Flaubert’s unfinished novel that finds an echo in Goncourt’s exactly contemporary narrative catalogue is the notion of collecting as a social rather than a solitary endeavor.
Turning first to the work’s identity as a reminiscence on the good times he shared with Jules, then, I cite a remark Goncourt makes early in the text as he enumerates the dining room’s con-tents, recalling fond memories of the dinner parties they used to give. He writes: “At that time, we were two: practically a married couple entertaining. Today the dining room is nothing more than the dining room of a lonely old man.”7 This remark not
5 Malin Zimm, “Writers-in-residence: Goncourt and Huysmans at home without a plot,” The Journal of Architecture 9, no. 3 (2004): 307.
6 See Bertrand Bourgeois, “La maison d’un artiste et À rebours: Du livre comme objet de collection à la maison-œuvre d’art,” Voix Plurielles 5, no. 1 (2008), for a detailed comparative analysis of the two works.
7 “Dans ce temps […] nous étions deux: c’était presque un ménage qui re-cevait […] Aujourd’hui la salle à manger […] n’est plus que la salle à man-ger d’un vieil homme seul” (Edmond de Goncourt, La maison d’un artiste [Paris: Charpentier, 1881], 1:21. *Hereafter cited as MA). All translations are my own.
only suggests the closeness the two brothers shared in life, but also casts Edmond in the role of the widower who preserves, or conserves, the domestic space following the death of his spouse.
Indeed, Claire O’Mahony has noted that Goncourt’s constant engagement with the house following Jules’s death seems to have functioned as a coping mechanism for that loss.8 If his sentimentality is hard to overlook, this is hardly a case where a death is the only catalyst for conservation. While this is made clear enough by the fact that Goncourt mentions any number of cherished objects purchased after Jules’s death, it is also sig-nificant that he considers, at some length, his own passion for collecting, in the chapter devoted to the Cabinet de travail where he traces the development of his identity as an amateur back to his childhood.
Goncourt begins with a pathologizing reflection on his col-lecting practice, musing, “I have often wondered about my pas-sion for trinkets, which has made me miserable and happy all my life. Finding in my memory those manic days of unreason-able purchases, I have wondered if this disease was an accident or whether it was hereditary.”9 His introduction of the notion of heredity here lacks the connotations of decline it so often carried in the nineteenth century. Rather than acknowledge himself and Jules as the termini of their family tree, Goncourt instead posi-tions himself at the pinnacle of his family’s line of collectors;
he passes over his father, who took a greater interest in practi-cal objects, naming his mother and aunt, who were themselves collectors and with whom he experienced “the first and expan-sive happiness of acquisition,” as his key role models.10 Recalling
8 Claire O’Mahony, “La maison d’un artiste: The Goncourts, Bibelots and Fin de Siècle Interiority,” in Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory, ed.
Harald Hendrix (London: Routledge, 2008), 189.
9 “souvent je me suis interrogé sur cette passion de bibelot qui m’a fait miséra-ble et heureux toute ma vie […] retrouvant dans ma mémoire ces journées maladives d’achats déraisonnables […] je me demandais si cette maladie était un accident […] ou si ce n’était plutôt une maladie héréditaire” (MA, 2:354).
10 “le premier et expansif bonheur de l’acquisition” (MA, 1:357).
their shopping trips, he deduces that it was these women “who made me the collector that I was, that I am, and that I will be all my life.”11 These reflections suggest that Goncourt’s transcrip-tion of the home makes it both a monument to himself and to his legacy in the same way that certain objects in the home, like the serving board mentioned above, function as surrogates for the late Jules while others recall relatives more distant in time.
The urge to monumentalize, common to artists of all stripes, is straightforwardly set out in his journal entry for July 7, 1883 — which Brigitte Koyama-Richard has already connected with La maison d’un artiste — where he writes: “It is an ongoing preoccupation of mine to survive myself, to leave behind me images of my person and of my house.”12
Certainly, the home Goncourt created and catalogued ex-cels the stereotypically overdone literary nineteenth-century interior, but it does so in a counterintuitively (though perhaps insincerely) unpretentious way. For example, he asserts that the collection of works on paper demonstrates “what a poor devil can amass by spending a little money on one thing.”13 Obviously anyone who is consistently spending money on art and collecti-bles cannot properly be said to be lacking means, yet Goncourt points to certain works that he was genuinely unable to pur-chase that still haunt him; one striking example is a Boucher drawing of Madame de Pompadour that he likens to “a woman that something stupid [money] kept you from possessing.”14 He equally mentions works he did purchase at a discount that he wishes he could have paid full price for, like a Jean-Michel
11 “qui ont fait de moi le bibeloteur que j’ai été, que je suis, et que je serai toute ma vie” (MA, 1:357).
12 “C’est chez moi une occupation perpétuelle […] à me survivre, à laisser des images de ma personne, de ma maison” (Edmond de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 9 vols. [Paris: Charpentier, 1887–96], 6:269). For Koyama-Richard’s comments see Brigitte Koyama-Richard, “La maison d’un artiste: Edmond de Goncourt et l’art japonais,” Hikaku Bun-gaku: Journal of Comparative Literature 40 (1997): iii.
13 “ce qu’un pauvre diable […] en massant un rien d’argent sur une seule chose, peut faire” (MA, 1:28).
14 “une femme qu’un rien stupide vous a empêché de posséder” (MA, 1:51–3).
Moreau that he purchased for 400 francs after its owner was unable to get her asking price of 1,000, and notes his regret over not having had the money to spend.15
If the collections were assembled according to bourgeois fi-nancial considerations (indeed, the house itself, purchased for 100,000 francs, is characterized as an “unreasonable purchase for the bourgeois reason [again, money]” in their journal), they nonetheless evince the aristocratic attitudes of their owners.16 It is clear, for instance, that the brothers had no particular inten-tion of selling what they purchased at a profit, despite selling off part of their collection in 1856 to refine it, even if Edmond sometimes lists auction prices for comparable items. To be sure, the collection included many objectively valuable objects and works of art whose value only appreciated, particularly as the years passed and ancien régime collectibles again became de-sirable and, importantly, as the vogue for all things “Oriental”
gained momentum. However, to continue with the compari-son between this private home and the public museum, a space whose primary aim is to broaden a given collection’s audience, it is worth noting the slippage between Goncourt’s eagerness in the role of interior decorator and his comparable passion in the role of curator; he genuinely loves these objects, but he also un-derstands them as belonging to an important collection, and he is by no means blind to their significant market value.
In this sense, aesthetic and affective attachment seem to be on almost equal footing in the text. As I noted above, Gon-court’s sentimentality is in evidence in many spaces throughout the home; in his bedroom, there is another family heirloom, a small chest that belonged to his grandmother and housed her cachemires, where he stores sentimental objects that evoke her and other departed family members, such as a bank reg-ister dating from the Directory, his mother’s wedding ring, his
15 MA, 1:118–19.
16 Koyama-Richard emphasizes how the house itself is instrumental in the acquisition of the collections (Koyama-Richard, “La maison d’un artiste,”
ii). See also Edmond de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt, 3:234: “achat […]
déraisonnable pour la raison bourgeois.”
father’s military cross, and a lock of his sister Lili’s hair.17 Yet, interestingly given the very personal nature of this object, the most significant element of this particular décor, and the focus of the narrative text describing it, are the tapestries that line its walls and to which Goncourt seems equally attached. It is these works that truly succeed in transporting him away from the nineteenth-century present and into the past, and that make
“this bedroom a bedroom of the last century.”18 He describes at length the ways in which these embroidered works interact with the light in the room at various times of the day noting that they are particularly suggestive (and lifelike) in the semi-lucid mo-ment between dreaming and waking.19 He wonders why tapes-try, which he likens to painting throughout this passage, does not seem to inspire children’s curiosity when “an exchange of curiosity, of faith, and of affection with the tapestry’s characters”
might be possible.20 In addition to his personal longing for a time before his brother’s death, then, Goncourt experiences a kind of aesthetic longing to step from his already rarified reality into the even more beautiful worlds represented in the various works of art that fill his home.
This need to exchange reality for beauty, in the absence of any real human companionship, can only be satisfied via inter-action with the collections as is made evident in descriptions offered in several chapters over the course of the work. Indeed, as the bedroom is enjoyable because of its pleasingly diverting tapestries, the Cabinet de l’Extrême Orient and the boudoir are equally prized for their capacity to inspire; as Goncourt puts it,
“even now when I prepare to write a bit of text that does not contain the slightest knickknack, I need to spend an hour in this Oriental [sic] cabinet and boudoir.”21 In spite of Goncourt’s
se-17 MA, 2:199.
18 “cette chambre une chambre du siècle passé” (MA, 2:200).
19 MA, 2:203.
20 “un commerce de curiositié, de foi, d’affection avec les personnages de tapisserie” (MA, 2:202).
21 “À l’heure présente […] quand je me prépare à écrire […] un morceau où il
21 “À l’heure présente […] quand je me prépare à écrire […] un morceau où il